[Mengu Gungor]

This looks great Jan, your proportions look good, and your drawing has good overall cohesiveness. Keep working on your basic structural drawing techniques. Create stronger indications of the planes of the head. And don’t forget hair has structure too. The better you get at those initial stages, the better your finished portraits will be.

Also for more finished pieces, I’d suggest an exercise before you begin, to create a light to dark gradient with your drawing implements. Then squint at your reference, and figure out where the darkest and lightest areas are. Once you’ve identified these, you’ll have an easier time compressing the value range in your reference to what your tools can create. Pay particular attention to local values. Currently in your sketch, the skin and shirt have very close local value, and the hair is not that far off. I suspect in your reference, these three pieces have more of a difference in value.

Keep on sketching!

[Mengu Gungor]

Hi André, this is a wonderful painting. I really like the saturated orange from the reflected light, and the magentas you used in the wine glass. You also did a great job on the textures both of the fruits and the glass. Three things I’d point out… First is the tangent the orange makes with the edge of the table. This is something we want to avoid compositionally, and can easily be done by lowering the edge of the table. Second is the uniform space between your objects. I would probably have placed the orange a little behind or a little in front of the lemon, with their forms overlapping, so you could show more depth. And third I’d check your ellipses for the wine glass. They all seem to have about the same width, which makes the scene a bit isometric and surreal. Your horizon line is clearly above the wine glass. The glass opening should be the narrowest ellipse since it’s closes to the horizon, and they should get wider as they go down. This will indicate better perspective. Also the ellipse for the wine is a little pointy at the ends, should probably be a bit more rounded. Hope that helps, and as I said, I really like your colors and textures on this. Keep on painting.

[Mengu Gungor]

Hey Mr Sanyal, I can definitely recognize him, and I think the shapes of the features are very close to your reference, you did well there. However, a lot of the essence of likeness comes from the overall gesture, big shapes, placement and size of the features. We can recognize someone we know from a hundred feet away in a crowd from just a basic silhouette. So, though the individual features are important, we have to pay attention to the big picture all the time, to capture and maintain a likeness. I still struggle with this as well, but that is the advise I have gotten myself.

There are also steps you can take to check your work. Plum lines are very useful. For instance, if you draw a plum line down from the corner of the forehead through the eye and to the chin, you can see where some of the features are slightly off. I tried demonstrate this below. Also I felt the shoulder line needs to come up some, Mr DiCaprio has a little bit shorter neck, and camera angle can make a difference there. Also try to differentiate the front plane of the face from the side plane with a more distinct transition. This gives the face more structure, I tried to indicate that edge with the red line. And I felt he needed more room in the back of the head and the ear/jawline/neck connection could be clarified more, which I indicated in green. I tried to make those changes to show the difference in the middle picture. I also added a bit more tone to the background on the left side, to create a clearer silhouette. And I unified the values of the shadow side some more. I didn’t change the shapes of your features much, only the placements and size.

And in the third picture, I tried to show my thought process of how I’m placing the features, and the overall gesture I’m thinking of, for lining up the features structurally. Hope this helps. Keep drawing, and keep having others check your work. That’s what helps us improve. You did a wonderful job with this portait.

[Mengu Gungor]

These are amazing! Great gestures, great movement of the spine, solid forms, nice designs… One thing I would say is that the feet perhaps need a bit more height, a bit more meat, and a bit more width in the ankle (ankles are typically wider than wrists). Our feet are the platforms we balance ourselves on. For instance, in the second pose in the top row, I’d really want to see how the ball of her right foot is bearing most her weight, and how the toes bend to facilitate that. That is an important facet of the pose. But holy cow, these figures are stunning, great work!

[Mengu Gungor]

Wow, these are fantastic! Your values are great, I like your compositions, features of the face look very accurate and are done very delicately and deliberately, expressions are great, I could keep going… I don’t have anything to fix per se, without knowing what goals you are setting out to achieve, and how close your work is to your vision. I’ll give you a few suggestions to experiment with.

Maybe spend a little more time on your drapery. The fabrics look like they don’t quite have the same attention you have shown the portraits. The man’s shirt seems to have all soft edges, and you could probably identify some hard edges, to differentiate the cast shadows of the fabric from the form shadows. Fabric behaves much like figure, folds have form shadows, core shadows, reflected light, and cast shadows, that you should be able to identify if you do a few studies. Also you can observe the sheen or translucency of fabrics and try to communicate that in your paintings. I’m sure you know all this, but bringing it up anyway, as I feel that’s an area you could strengthen.

Another thing you can explore is hue variations in your skin tones. You could add a little more red in the nose and ears, more yellow in the forehead, and experiment with mixing some blues, greens, or purples into the skin around the chin, or on the shadow side. You have great control of your values, so some hue variations while keeping the same value structure can bring greater richness to your work.

Your work is absolutely amazing, keep on painting.

[Mengu Gungor]

Hi Gary, I think you did well with the youthful appearance in your first post. Deeper shadows can indeed make a model look older, and should be approached in a more delicate manner, identifying hard and sharp edges carefully, and making sure soft edges transition smoothly. I think your main challenge was the photo reference. Lighting in an overcast snow scenes is particularly challenging because not only is there a lot of diffuse light, but reflections from the snow can be brighter than the light from the sky. Add to this the challenge of blushed skin on a cold winter day, plus hair color that’s nearly the same value as skin, and your subject is about as difficult as can be. For studies, I would suggest indoor setting, lit through either a window or a single light source. These will provide you with much better shadow shapes to help you sculpt the planes of the head.  I think you’ve done a good job with the placement and shapes of the features. Perhaps eyes are a little large, but that is helpful if it was a stylistic choice for a younger appearance. Hope this helps. Keep on sketching.

[Mengu Gungor]

Wow, thank you so much for the tips @stevehuston. I am putting them into action, for my practice sketches tonight. And a big thank you to all NMA instructors for giving us your valuable time to do critiques. I’ve been watching and listening to all of them and soaking in the knowledge.

[Mengu Gungor]

Hey Roman, it looks like you’re on a good path, you’re putting in a lot of work. First thing I noticed is that elements you introduce into the scene don’t seem integrated as well as could be. I find this is one of the harder things to do from imagination, and I think can best be improved by doing more studies of real life. I’d suggest doing more still life paintings, plein air paintings (landscapes, city scapes, interiors), and so on, to get a better sense of how items interact with each other and with the environment. This is the same advice I’ve gotten, for a similar set of problems, and am still working on…

I did a paint over of the first image you have there. I really like the atmosphere of this one, and I think you did a good job with the characters. I’ll talk through some of the changes I would suggest, and why.

The character on the right was a bit too close to the edge of the composition, I felt he was important enough to move all the way inside the frame. I also shrunk him a bit and increased the size of what I felt was the main/more important character closer to us. The rock on the left was running parallel to the horse’s tail, so I removed it. Instead, to close off the composition a bit, I placed a large rock formation on the left, to keep the viewer engaged inside the frame. I moved the moon to form a sort of triangle between the heads and the moon. I added a few more layers of rock formations to create more depth.

Then on the characters, I added more shadows, as would be appropriate in a day lit scenario like this. I kept those shadows lighter for the character further away, to fit the atmosphere. As a matter of fact, I felt his dark shirt was too dark for the distance he’s standing at, so I lightened its overall value. I also added some warmer and more saturated highlights to the closer character to bring him forward more.

And overall I played with level adjustments a bit, to get the colors to work a little better, and more unified.

If I was going to work on this more, I would continue to improve the composition, and solve problems. Two characters in this composition still don’t feel quite right, I think it needs another element of interest, maybe another rider, or maybe just another horse that’s carrying a different load. The horizon level I think is a little above the knee, around mid-thigh, so I think I’d want to make some changes to communicate that better. And I might play with the design of the mountains in the back a bit more, find some references and make them a bit more characteristic of a real location, instead of generic rock formations.

I hope you find this helpful. I think if you do more studies from life, paying particularly close attention to values, you will find your concept art will naturally improve as well. Keep on sketching!

[Mengu Gungor]

Beautiful still life Stephen. Love the colors, and you seem to have a good understanding of rendering transparency and reflections. Only note I would have on that is to be a little more conscious of compression of the reflections toward the edges. I like how you kept the front grapes in focus, and the back grapes out of focus. However, all the grapes in the back have soft edges, and all the grapes in front have hard edges, and it’s usually better to have some more variety in our edges. So you could introduce a few firmer edges for the grapes in the back, maybe directing the eye around or toward the center of the composition. And you could introduce a few select soft edges in the foreground. If you squint, wherever the values are close between grapes might be a good place for a soft or lost edge. I also love your expressive brushwork and mark making. Great job on this, keep on sketching!

[Mengu Gungor]

One more quick tip… Before I started, I looked up a few more pictures of Ian Hanmore, just to see what the structure of his face was like, so that may be helpful when you have a difficult lighting situation like this, where lighting may be obscuring the structure a bit.

[Mengu Gungor]

This is great Max, I think you picked a challenging lighting situation, but it still reads quite well. I spent a little time on a paintover, and here are some thoughts as I was going through.

The lighting is fighting the structure a little bit, so the brow ridge and the eyes don’t appear lined up. Also the mouth and chin may be a little off center. I think maybe you started to exaggerate the angle of the head a bit at some point, but then straightened it out a bit. So I liquified and adjusted the features around a bit until they looked a bit better structurally. You could probably do a bit more work with the eyes, making sure the eyelids wrap properly around the eyeball. My main recommendation to you would be to spend more time on the drawing stage before you get to painting.

The values were largely good. I darkened the neck area a bit, it seemed too light, and that diagonal edge wasn’t reading quite right across the neck. Also darkened the teeth a bit, they are always darker than what we think we see. And finally I did a levels adjustment to bring up all shadows a bit, since there is a lot of information there still, and we can reserve the darkest darks for the deepest recesses, which I emphasized, like the eye socket.

The colors seemed a bit monochromatic, we can introduce and exaggerate the hues in the reference to get a more painterly look. So I exaggerated/introduced some greenish hues in the shadows, and some warmer, yellowish/orangish hues in the light. Then I messed around with the background a bit to introduce those colors there and create some more harmony (basically just a fix for what I was changing). It may look rougher than what you have, since it needs more time for refinement, but you can place it on a different layer on your image, and turn it off/on to see the changes better. I really hope this helps. Keep on sketching!

[Mengu Gungor]

Great pastel sketch John, I like the variety of color you’re using for skin, and the features are delicate and well placed. I had the same thoughts as Gary. Think of hair more as clumps than strands (if it helps, think Disney hair), or think about sculpting it with clay. Also for portraits, I like to indicate a bit of the neck and shoulder to suggest the gesture of the pose, even if it’s not rendered fully. Also if I squint, the composition is primarily emphasizing the hairline, while you put most your work into the face, so I would have darkened the background, to bring more attention there. Here is my very rough attempt at some of these. I hope you find it helpful, and keep on sketching.

[Mengu Gungor]

Great drawing! I think the values are solid, and I really like that you are differentiating between hard edges for cast shadows, and soft edges for form shadows. I noticed a few tangents and marked them, that could be eliminated fairly easily when picking where you’re sitting. Or if that’s not possible, you can move the arm a little so it doesn’t come straight out of the rib cage, or move the foot so the heel of one foot doesn’t run along the ball of the other. Hope that’s helpful. Keep it up!

[Mengu Gungor]

Joshua, I posted the images in an earlier post (on page 2), so instructors can feel free to ignore the instagram link, I would delete it but there seems to be no way to do that. Thank you.

[Mengu Gungor]

Please ignore my duplicate posts, I was having difficulty posting, some of the posts showed up a day or so later.

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